Cite as: Oikonomakis L., 2018, "Solidarity in transition: The case of Greece", in della Porta D. (eds) Solidarity Mobilizations in the ‘Refugee Crisis’. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Refugee Solidarity Initiatives that evolved in Greece throughout 2015–2016, which form what I call the Refugee Solidarity Movement (RSM). It consists of both new and pre-existing organisations, most of them of local character, that form a loose nationwide network. The ‘refugee crisis’ that evolved in this period can also be separated into two phases, divided by the EU–Turkey agreement, which changed the political context tremendously. Each of them had its own characteristics: the government, the movements, and the refugees and migrants had to change their strategies as a result of the changing political context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on four islands of the North Aegean, Crete, and three main cities of Greece, I argue that the solidarity that the Greek people and the RSM showed with the moving populations was subject to a triple transition (spatial, temporal, thematic) and that it depended heavily on the changing political context.